v_kyr Posted September 2, 2022 Posted September 2, 2022 Vectorization and autotracing software for Win + Macs: Where * = "the more the better" Super Vectorizer 2 (commercial, Mac) ** TracedLines (commercial, Mac) Intaglio Vectorize (free to use, Mac) DragPotrace (Mac) + Potrace (free, Win + Mac) * Potrace (free, Win + Mac) * AutoTrace (free, Win+Mac) * Inkscape (free, Win + Mac) ** Illustrator (commercial, Win + Mac) CorelDraw (commercial, Win + Mac) MS Expression Design 4 (Win, nowadays free) OpenToonz (free, Win + Mac) Image Vectorizer (commercial, Mac) Trace (free, Win+Mac) Vector Magic (commercial, Win + Mac) *** vtracer (free, Win + Mac) * Vectorize! / Legoist (commercial, Mac) VectorStyler (commercial, Win + Mac) ...etc... Online tracing tools: autotracer vectorizer vectorizer.ai ** vectorization Vectorize Raster Images Online (online Photopea, free) VTracer * Online SVG Converter (by Potrace) Svgco Svgstorm SVGConverter ...etc... Online centerline supporting tracing tools: Rapid resizer fConvert Online Vectorizer ...etc... iPad tracing tools: Adobe Capture Vector Q Vectornator Vectorize! ...etc... Some forum threads about tool based bitmap tracing/vectorization: Image Tracing in Affinity Designer? Image Trace to Vector Path Converting Pixel drawing to Vector? Auto Trace In AFFINITY DESIGNER Best Image Vectorizer for Mac with Affinity Designer Good vector tracer or vectorizer ... and so on ... See also: Awesome PNG to SVG (GitHub) Comparison of raster-to-vector conversion software (Wikipedia) ...etc... gerard.raisen, Edmis, Susanne Wollatz and 27 others 20 10 Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2
DesignerMim by Miriam Posted September 14, 2022 Posted September 14, 2022 I can't wait for AD to have a vector tracing functionality! In the meantime, this list is handy. Thanks for sharing Quote Cheers, Miriam. > Let's connect: https://www.instagram.com/designermim/ > My site: https://designermim.com
veles Posted September 15, 2022 Posted September 15, 2022 It's extremely niche, but I've used Rasterbator ( https://rasterbator.net/ ) for several large-scale projects. Quote
v_kyr Posted September 16, 2022 Author Posted September 16, 2022 10 hours ago, veles said: It's extremely niche, but I've used Rasterbator ( https://rasterbator.net/ ) for several large-scale projects. Well that's more for halftone based poster creation, instead of vectorization/tracing images/graphics into plain vector curves. Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2
ashf Posted November 20, 2022 Posted November 20, 2022 SVGcode(Potrace GUI) is not on the list...https://svgco.de/ Quote
Rodi Posted November 20, 2022 Posted November 20, 2022 When push comes to shove, I use the vector doctor. Excellent work, great pricing. Quote
ashf Posted November 20, 2022 Posted November 20, 2022 apps that are "centerline supporting" are interesting... Quote
NotMyFault Posted November 20, 2022 Posted November 20, 2022 Vector Q is available on Mac, too. It showed me a 0€ in app purchase option to the pro version (which you need for export). Can’t say if this is for all users, or AppStore uses my purchase from iPad even for Mac. Quote Mac mini M1 A2348 | MBP M3 Windows 11 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080 LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 | Dell 27“ 4K iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589 Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps. I use iPad screenshots and videos even in the Desktop section of the forum when I expect no relevant difference.
loukash Posted November 20, 2022 Posted November 20, 2022 On 9/2/2022 at 7:16 PM, v_kyr said: Intaglio Vectorize (free to use, Mac) Interesting! I've had Intaglio since many years although I've rarely used it, mostly for converting those truly antique classic Mac documents in vector PICT fromat. But I didn't know about this plugin. It's gone from purgatorydesign.com but you can still download it from web.archive.org/web/20190313084538/purgatorydesign.com/Vectorize/Vectorize-Plugin.zip Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2
loukash Posted November 20, 2022 Posted November 20, 2022 On 9/2/2022 at 7:16 PM, v_kyr said: ...etc... Aaand… credit where credit's due: On El Capitan, I'm still launching Illustrator CS5 every now and then to trace bitmaps. Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2
DM1 Posted November 21, 2022 Posted November 21, 2022 I’ve had excellent results on iPad with an app called Vectorize! Very easy to use and capable of high detail when vectorising photos. Don’t know price as I got it on a free offer years ago. Quote M1 IPad Air 10.9/256GB lpadOS 17.1.1 Apple Pencil (2nd gen). Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Affinity Design 1.10.5 Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and betas. Official Online iPad Help documents (multi-lingual) here: https://affinity.https://affinity.help/
loukash Posted November 21, 2022 Posted November 21, 2022 On 9/2/2022 at 7:16 PM, v_kyr said: Intaglio Vectorize (free to use, Mac) 21 hours ago, loukash said: On El Capitan, I'm still launching Illustrator CS5 The good news: Intaglio 3.9.5 and the Vectorize plugin run on Catalina. The tracing feature is rather rudimentary but better than nothing. Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2
v_kyr Posted December 1, 2022 Author Posted December 1, 2022 On 11/21/2022 at 2:24 PM, loukash said: The tracing feature is rather rudimentary but better than nothing. It‘s nothing earth shaking and so more on the simple to use side. Similar as most other on Potrace and Autotrace based frontend/tracing tools too. Though the later (autotrace) in contrast supports color & centerline tracing. Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2
loukash Posted December 1, 2022 Posted December 1, 2022 New addition to the list: VectorStyler I bought it last week while it's currently on sale, and it's got a Trace panel. (Is it new? I don't remember if it already was in the public beta.) My favorite feature about VS is: it's still El Capitan compatible! Experimenting with it as I type this: Many options, a bunch of presets. Hm. Got stuck while attempting to trace the PNG version of my logo (as in my avatar here). Had to quit the app and start over, also adjusted some Performace preferences that may conflict with El Capitan ("Metal", obviously). No idea how to actually expand the traced vector shapes, the Expand button is grayed out. Or how to see the actual nodes. (RTFM I guess? Nah… ) So I just copied the monolithic traced object over to Designer… and voilà, here are my shapes and nodes. Depending on the trace settings, it may need some minor cleaning but the result is not all that shabby. Test passed. (As every so often with those Featuritis™ laden apps: I get tired of it quickly because I don't know where to start when there's an option for literally every aspect of the app, down to some obscure binary data compression formats in the document preferences. Here I praise Serif's courage not to implement everything they could be implementing. Focus is a Good Thing™.) Above test result in VS: And copied to ADe: Boldlinedesign 1 Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2
AdamStanislav Posted December 1, 2022 Posted December 1, 2022 2 hours ago, loukash said: it's still El Capitan compatible! What’s El Capitan??? Quote
walt.farrell Posted December 1, 2022 Posted December 1, 2022 20 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said: What’s El Capitan??? Very old macOS release, as I recall. AdamStanislav 1 Quote -- Walt Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases PC: Desktop: Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Laptop: Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU. Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2, 16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU iPad: iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.3, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard Mac: 2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1
AdamStanislav Posted December 1, 2022 Posted December 1, 2022 1 hour ago, walt.farrell said: Very old macOS release, as I recall. Thanks, Walt! walt.farrell 1 Quote
v_kyr Posted December 1, 2022 Author Posted December 1, 2022 10 hours ago, loukash said: New addition to the list: VectorStyler I bought it last week while it's currently on sale, and it's got a Trace panel. (Is it new? I don't remember if it already was in the public beta.) My favorite feature about VS is: it's still El Capitan compatible! It has vectorization/tracing capabilities since some recent version time now, but initially it didn‘t had. Offering backwards support until El Capitan is valuable and something I personally would vote as a plus here! Though on the other side in order for just tracing bitmap/raster images, there are other much cheaper commercial and also a bunch of quite good freeware tracing tools available. Thus I won‘t place VS directly to the above list, since otherwise would have to add Illustrator & CorelDraw etc. too there then, since all or most of those vector graphics tools have and offer the one or other tracing facilities. My personal most used tracer (beside my own coded tracing tool) is not VS but instead SV … 😉 ashf and loukash 2 Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2
loukash Posted January 22, 2023 Posted January 22, 2023 I just stumbled upon the freebie Image2Vector on the Mac App Store. It's a bit old, supposedly even Lion compatible. But it works on Catalina, at least with relatively small images:apps.apple.com/app/image2vector-converts-images-to-vector-graphics/id1042548577 It may crash on larger images, it looks like a memory leak. Also not listed yet is Vectornator for Mac, also freebie:apps.apple.com/app/vectornator-vector-design-art/id1219074514 In v3.x it can just "auto trace" with no settings as far as I can tell. v4 for Mac has a Trace settings panel but I cannot install it because it requires Big Sur. In general I find the app awkward to use on Mac. I have played with it on iPad before, but wasn't much impressed either. (I guess there's a reason that we have affinity for Affinity, huh?) Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2
v_kyr Posted January 22, 2023 Author Posted January 22, 2023 13 minutes ago, loukash said: I just stumbled upon the freebie Image2Vector on the Mac App Store ... I know that one and it's sadly very buggy, it also doesn't generate on export correct SVG code, thus it's not recomended and not on the list. - Meaning, that I deliberately don't recommend everything and thus didn't included every existing crap here too. Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2
loukash Posted January 22, 2023 Posted January 22, 2023 Just now, v_kyr said: doesn't generate on export correct SVG code On a quick test, PDF export looked usable to me. Good enough for an old freebie. Haven't tried SVG. Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2
v_kyr Posted January 22, 2023 Author Posted January 22, 2023 12 hours ago, loukash said: On a quick test, PDF export looked usable to me. Good enough for an old freebie. Haven't tried SVG. Yes, though as you discovered yourself, It sometimes crashes on larger images and for sure has in such situations somewhere a memory leak then. BTW, I've once tested mostly all availble (...opensource + commercial, cmdline + GUI based...) MacOS (>= El Capitan) vectorization tools. - And IMO the best stand alone ones so far in sum up are ... Super Vectorizer 2 (commercial, MacOS only) Vector Magic (commercial, Win + MacOS) vtracer (free portable cmdline tracer, all platforms) ... some others are quite good usable too (like potrace & autotrace) but won't be as easy to use for plain cmdline inexperienced users. Most other things are just GUI frontends which do use and execute an underlined potrace & autotrace. - Using another full blown vector app (Illustrator, Corel Draw, Inkscape, VectorStyler ... etc.) is another workaround, though not offering the quickest turnarounds for bitmap to vector vectorization/tracing at all here. For the quickest turnarounds on a Mac, I would recommend Super Vectorizer 2 (SV2), which is pretty fast, versatile in terms of all sort of vectorization and produces good results. SV2 is often available cheap(er) via AppStore "Two Dollar Tuesdays" and some third party "lifetime deal" offers. Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2
loukash Posted January 22, 2023 Posted January 22, 2023 13 minutes ago, v_kyr said: as you discovered yourselve, It sometimes crash on larger images Meanwhile I also tested on El Capitan with the same large TIFF image that would crash it on Catalina: no memory leak, no other serious problems noticed. So the main issue with Image2Vector appears to be the lack of optimization for recent MacOS versions. Other than that, since there's no documentation, you just have to figure out by trial and error what the parameters will do. There's a preview button so it's possible to find out the optimal setting before exporting. That still makes it an easy to use tool for me on El Capitan. Ultimately easier to use than e.g. VectorStyler which actually has serious issues to stay stable on El Capitan; although that's not necessarily unexpected, given that primarily it must be compatible with Ventura as well. I expect El Capitan support being dropped from VectorStyler pretty soon. Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2
v_kyr Posted January 22, 2023 Author Posted January 22, 2023 35 minutes ago, loukash said: Ultimately easier to use than e.g. VectorStyler which actually has serious issues to stay stable on El Capitan; although that's not necessarily unexpected, given that primarily it must be compatible with Ventura as well. I expect El Capitan support being dropped from VectorStyler pretty soon. Sooner or later all actualized/updated apps won't support older MacOS versions (like El Capitan, Sierra/High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina) at all. - Also the actual trend for most actual and new MacOS apps goes to Apple Silicon (arm architecture) apps, meaning that one sooner or later also has to migrate her/his Apple hardware over to the new Apple silicon one and so MacOS version support accordingly. The Intel Hardware & MacOS support will probably be given up (abandoned) in the near future ... Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2
loukash Posted January 22, 2023 Posted January 22, 2023 On 9/2/2022 at 7:16 PM, v_kyr said: iPad tracing tools: Vector Q Vector Q freebie is also available in the Mac App Store for Catalina & above: apps.apple.com/app/vector-q/id1448103717 Has a pretty impressive set of presets and is fast. Apart from the "vectorizer", as a vector editor at appears to be rather rudimentary: I haven't seen anything else that couldn't be done in Affinity v2 by some means. Exchange with Affinity possible only via PDF/SVG export. But the vectorizer results are not shabby. This is from a mere 600×600 px image, on the left the placed original, on the right Vector Q's interpretation using my own "ultra pure vector" preset, exported via PDF: Quote MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2
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